No short term relief of multi-core programming issues available

Beside all announcements to tackle the multi-core programming challenges, no major breakthrough can be ascertained. The issues are especially relevant on the client-side in the domain of mainstream applications. I have already posted a couple of comments on that.
Even the business world has identified the current status as a problem. The Fortune magazine addresses the topic in the last issue with an interesting article - A chip too far? The article is about risks and opportunities, and a Stanford professor describes the situation as a crisis – probably yes, probably not. It is definitely a huge chance for skilled programmers and people with the right ideas. I do agree with one statement totally – after years of abstractions in terms of platforms and languages, the complexity and hardware dependencies of multi-core architectures increase the learning curve for an average programmer dramatically.

Wrapping-Up Black Hat

There have been a couple of highlights presented @Black Hat USA this year. I don’t want to distract interested folks from reading the docs and presentations which will be available from the website. Just some big topics from my point of view:

- DNS issues, DNS issues, DNS issues
- Web 2.0 (and also “Web-OS”) security problems
- Flaws in Software-update mechanisms via the internet
- Issues resulting in weak number generation

Black Hat USA 2008 ...

... was a great event. Beside all the cool briefings, the keynote from Ian Angell, Professor Information Systems at London School of Economics, was a highlight. The speech was about Complexity in Computer Security. I'm gonna point at the slides as soon as they will be availabe.